I need to troubleshoot a re-install of NOOBS

Question

I had been using my Raspberry Pi as a desktop computer, and I wanted to reset it so that I could use it for a project, so I moved my personal files to a newer computer, and formatted the sd card, before installing NOOBS on it again. I was a bit concerned that my sd card was showing up as two drives, but seeing as drive F:\ (named "RECOVERY") was showing up as an sd card to my computer, while drive G:\ had the same thumbnail as my flash drive has when I plug it in to a usb port, and the files in drive F:\ looked a lot like those in the .zip of NOOBS lite that I had downloaded for re-install, I decided to format drive F:\ using the official SD Card Formatter. It seemed to work, and I extracted the .zip file onto the root directory of the newly formatted drive (drive G:\ had disappeared at this point) and when I plugged it into my Pi, it started by showing the color screen, with no lightning bolt, then the "Hold shift for recovery mode" screen, but during that screen, a popup showed up saying that the SD card may be corrupted, and when I clicked close (there were no other options) it reported, "Waiting for SD card" and would never stop, giving me no options. I tried to put in in recover mode, but this didn't work either. I gave up and cut power to the Pi, and tried again, but it did the same thing. Is there anything I'm doing wrong? What should I do?

Answer 1

Don't bother with Noobs.

Assuming you are after Raspberry Pi OS (32bit) (previously Raspbian), just use the new Raspberry Pi Imager to re-flash your sd card.

https://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/

Answer 2

You entered the boot partition. In most of raspbian like OS those files are common. Don't worry. You files are lost from there. You files were in rootfs which has been updated and partitioned again.